The riding season is still months away for impatient Minnesota motorcyclists. But hundreds of bikers recently got the next best thing: a virtual ride to Sturgis, by way of Needles Highway, through South Dakota's famed Badlands.

That groggy feeling you may have upon waking is called sleep inertia, and it can be a sign that you’ve slept too little or, in some cases, too much, Paruthi says. Experts "don’t have a good explanation of why some people, if they sleep too long, actually feel more tired," she says. It might be genetics, but paying attention to this feeling can help you calibrate the amount of sleep you need, she says.

If you’re serious about learning to design for web and mobile platforms, there’s never been a better time to get started: pay what you want for eight great courses to learn responsive web design, grasp the fundamentals of user experience design, and master the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver, with over 80 hours of video tutorials from professional instructors.

Leonard Nimoy, the legendary actor known to the world as Star Trek ‘s Mr. Spock, died at his home in Los Angeles this morning. He was 83. Almost as soon as word of his passing hit the Internet, friends, former co-stars, and fans began expressing grief over the actor’s passing.

Just rattling off a few examples, the LG Watch Urbane , Apple Watch and Google Glass are each delectably crafted and fashionable. And their efforts to break into the fashion-savvy world haven't gone unnoticed. I too enjoy stellar design as much as the next person, but it doesn't distract me from seeing these wearables for what they are: technologies that have come to market bass ackwards. Maybe I'm just strange, but I require function before form and too few wearables have just that.

Bruce Lee is widely considered to be one of the greatest martial artists who ever lived, and he is revered for his contributions to film and culture. However, much of who he was beyond his writing and work onscreen is still a mystery to audiences. Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee's daughter, today announced that she is developing a definitive biopic on the action icon with Hollywood help, aiming to capture the essence of her father in a way that previous films have failed to do.

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

The new reporting feature is currently available for 50 percent of Facebook users in the U.S. and will roll out to the rest of the country in the next few months, a spokesperson for Facebook told The Huffington Post in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Don't expect the net neutrality drama to end here, though. Verizon has already made vague threats about suing the agency if it went through the public utility route, and Wheeler expects other lawsuits as well. Verizon's last legal action against the FCC led an appeals court to strike down its earlier (but far weaker) open internet rules on jurisdictional grounds. That's what ultimately pushed the agency to reclassify broadband -- now that it's viewed as a utility like telephone service, the FCC is free to make stronger regulatory decisions. The agency is aiming to alleviate fears of overregulation through forbearance, a process that lets it legally ignore certain regulations that other public utilities have to deal with. That includes things like limiting rates and unbundling, which lets companies take advantage of equipment and services from competitors.

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None of these cities are planning—yet—to go completely car-free. And it's possible that may never happen; it's likely that future cities will have at least a small fleet of self-driving electric cars on hand that can eliminate some of the current challenges around parking, congestion and pollution. But it's also clear that urban planners are finally recognizing that streets should be designed for people, not cars.

Jimmy feels that all of this anti-vaccination silliness is starting to snowball, so he invited some real doctors to address it. These are actual medical professionals so hear them out and then decide for yourself. SUBSCRIBE to get the latest #KIMMEL: http://bit.ly/JKLSubscribe Watch the latest Halloween Candy Prank: http://bit.ly/KimmelHalloweenCandy Watch the latest Mean Tweets: http://bit.ly/JKLMeanTweets8 Connect with Jimmy Kimmel Live Online: Visit the Jimmy Kimmel Live WEBSITE: http://bit.ly/JKLWebsite Like Jimmy Kimmel Live on FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/JKLFacebook Follow Jimmy Kimmel Live on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/JKLTwitter Follow Jimmy Kimmel Live on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/JKLInstagram About Jimmy Kimmel Live: Jimmy Kimmel serves as host and executive producer of Emmy-winning "Jimmy Kimmel Live," ABC's late-night talk show. "Jimmy Kimmel Live" is well known for its huge viral video successes with 2.5 billion views on YouTube alone. Some of Kimmel's most popular comedy bits include - Mean Tweets, Lie Witness News, Jimmy's Twerk Fail Prank, Unnecessary Censorship, YouTube Challenge, The Baby Bachelor, Movie: The Movie, Handsome Men's Club, Jimmy Kimmel Lie Detective and music videos like "I (Wanna) Channing All Over Your Tatum" and a Blurred Lines parody with Robin Thicke, Pharrell, Jimmy and his security guard Guillermo.

It was this that O'Followell used to illustrate the effects of tight lacing on the ribcage, in a series of striking images included in a paper entitled Le Corset. In it, he argued that the corset not only affected a woman's physical health, but also her behaviour. He cites novelist Arabella Kenealy, who in 1904 penned an article about the ill effects of the corset -- including an account of a strange and possibly nonexistent experiment involving putting corsets on monkeys -- noting that she blamed the corset for "bad language."

Musk is already building his own Hyperloop test track in Texas, but HTT says Musk's track is a scaled-down model, allowing for easier testing of the physics involved. HTT's track will be designed for human passengers, testing the passenger systems, but will come with other limitations. With only five miles of track, the craft will top out at just 200mph rather than the 760mph predicted in Musk's initial documents. "It's not about speed," Ahlborn told The Verge . "There are a lot of other things that need to be optimized."

"This is why I first spoke about the idea two years ago, to get people talking about it," Dr Canavero said. "If society doesn't want it, I won't do it. But if people don't want it in the US or Europe, that doesn't mean it won't be done somewhere else. I'm trying to go about this the right way, but before going to the moon, you want to make sure people will follow you."

Pakistani educator Ziauddin Yousafzai reminds the world of a simple truth that many don’t want to hear: Women and men deserve equal opportunities for education, autonomy, an independent identity. He tells stories from his own life and the life of his daughter, Malala, who was shot by the Taliban in 2012 simply for daring to go to school. "Why is my daughter so strong?” Yousafzai asks. “Because I didn’t clip her wings."

Most people instinctively avoid conflict, but as Margaret Heffernan shows us, good disagreement is central to progress. She illustrates (sometimes counterintuitively) how the best partners aren’t echo chambers — and how great research teams, relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree.

Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated — until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.

Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at. Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object. “Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance,” says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “But I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.” (Neitz sees white-and-gold.)

Amazon has been experimenting with new shipping methods lately, but one day soon it might not have to worry about sending items at all, and use 3D printers to produce them on the curbs outside customers' homes instead. The e-commerce giant has filed several patent applications for a system that could print goods on-demand in "mobile manufacturing hubs" — trucks outfitted with 3D printers that could rapidly produce and deliver items on their travels.

In her New Orleans neighborhood, artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang turned an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard asking a fill-in-the-blank question: “Before I die I want to ___.” Her neighbors' answers — surprising, poignant, funny — became an unexpected mirror for the community. (What's your answer?)

How much of what you think about your brain is actually wrong? In this whistlestop tour of dis-proved science, Ben Ambridge walks through 10 popular ideas about psychology that have been proven wrong — and uncovers a few surprising truths about how our brains really work.

Pichai, though, seems to be echoing the recent thoughts of Motorola President Rick Osterloh. Osterloh was responding to hardly veiled criticism of his company's belief in customization. This criticism has come from Apple's design head Jony Ive. Ive didn't mention Motorola by name, but he described its concept as "abdicating your responsibility as a designer."

Throughout human evolution, multiple versions of humans co-existed. Could we be mid-upgrade now? At TEDxSummit, Juan Enriquez sweeps across time and space to bring us to the present moment — and shows how technology is revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way.

The Guardian has posted a video that will melt your heart into an mushy stew. According to the short, a blind man has the ability to see his wife after 10 years. Allen Zderared, now in his late 60s, began to lose his site nearly two decades ago, but thanks to a prototype bionic eye and the help of Minnesota's Mayo Clinic, the Minnesotan can "see shapes and human forms."

The Russian photographer uses high-speed lenses to capture wildlife subjects normally too challenging to photograph out in nature. His latest series captures the secret lives of squirrels as they search for nuts in snowy forest outside of Voronezh. The photos take a closer look at, as Trunov tells Mashable , "amusing, playful and curious little animals" that are often seen but rarely interacted with.

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Rewinding to whatever “the norm” was before my break: I spent lots of time on social media. As an author, product maker, self-employed, brand-builder type person, I’ve used social to build awareness of what I do and what I sell. I use it to connect, network, and stay in touch with friends (most of whom I’ve become friends with on those networks).

People have been searching for ways to speed up the internet since the days when dial-up and AIM were ubiquitous. One of the more common techniques is caching, where certain information is stored locally as opposed to transferring everything anew each time it's requested. But others have resorted to tricks like lowering the resolution of images and videos; still others have spent countless hours tweaking and optimizing code to cut just milliseconds from their load times. These options are useful, but are really just Band-Aids. So Google decided to dramatically overhaul HTTP/1.1 and create SPDY; the results have been impressive. In general, communication between a server and a browser using SPDY is much faster, even when encryption is applied. At a minimum, the transfer speed with SPDY can improve by about 10 percent and, in some cases, can reach numbers closer to 40 percent. Such has been the success of SPDY that in 2012 the group of Google engineers behind the project decided to create a new protocol based on the technology, and that started the story that leads us to the current HTTP/2 draft.

Artist iO Tillett Wright has photographed 2,000 people who consider themselves somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum and asked many of them: Can you assign a percentage to how gay or straight you are? Most people, it turns out, consider themselves to exist in the gray areas of sexuality, not 100% gay or straight. Which presents a real problem when it comes to discrimination: Where do you draw the line? (Filmed at TEDxWomen.)

But then he came up with the idea for Walker & Co., a concept both he and Horowitz believe could grow over time into something big. The largest American consumer-goods companies have focused on the largest domestic market, and in so doing have neglected the different needs of minorities. African-Americans have grown accustomed to limited, second-class options when it comes to the health and beauty category. For men, these include depilatory creams and powders like Magic Shave. Its copper-colored branding and packaging—often the hue chosen for products targeting black buyers, which generally reside together on what's come to be known as the "black shelf" or "black section" of a drugstore aisle—is nearly identical to what it looked like when it was created in 1901. Then there are the desultory products created to combat razor bumps, a problem that, according to Walker, arises for around 80% of black consumers when they use three- and four-blade systems like the ones popularized by Gillette and Bic. Those razors can cut beneath the skin, leading to irritation for customers, especially African-American men, when their coarse or curly follicles start to grow back.

“Remember before the internet?” asks Joi Ito. “Remember when people used to try to predict the future?” In this engaging talk, the head of the MIT Media Lab skips the future predictions and instead shares a new approach to creating in the moment: building quickly and improving constantly, without waiting for permission or for proof that you have the right idea. This kind of bottom-up innovation is seen in the most fascinating, futuristic projects emerging today, and it starts, he says, with being open and alert to what’s going on around you right now. Don’t be a futurist, he suggests: be a now-ist.

Arriola and Anderson say they've designed the Runcible to last for years, if not decades. How? You'll just replace its innards when they need an upgrade. Its curved back can be swapped with one of Monohm's selection of high-end woods with fanciful-sounding names like swamp ash and maple burl -- or with 3D-printed alternatives. They're calling it an "heirloom" electronic device and are introducing it just weeks before Apple is set to debut a high-end smartwatch that has many wondering how long it will last before requiring a replacement.

I think some of the naysayers (below) are missing some important points here. For one thing, if "vacant lots cost a million bucks" in Jackson, and there are lots of tourists, at least breaking even by selling high-end organic produce should be no problem. Organic is worth a lot. Secondly, this is kind of a pilot program, to test theories and things. If it is a total failure, well, they stop doing it. Otherwise, it can be expanded. Not a huge risk, really. They will still have the real estate, and equipment. It's sunny in Wyoming, and I can tell you this...heating won't be a big problem. Even in freezing weather, inside of a thin nylon tent can be pretty warm, never mind a glass walled (hopefully double-paned) greenhouse. Once heat is in there, it will stay in there, and the sun will quickly heat it up, regardless of the outside temperature. The biggest expense will be electricity for the pumps. Once this gets rolling they may well become a huge company.

In his series Men and Cats , photographer David Williams captures the bond between the two companions, using his male, cat-loving friends as subjects. Williams hopes to help destroy the stereotype of cats being associated with female friendships (i.e. the crazy cat lady).

The tech industry used to be home to a disproportionate number of misfits and weirdos. Geeks. Nerds. People who needed to know how machines worked; needed to take them apart, make them better, and put them back together again. People who existed a little apart from society’s established hierarchy … and often saw that hierarchy as another machine to be deconstructed and improved.

What You'll Find in This List The 100 Best iPad Apps features native iPad apps that deliver unique and compelling tablet-based experiences, not iPhone or iPod touch apps running in 2X mode. For your convenience, we've divided our selections into seven easy-to-navigate categories: Social Networking; Business and Productivity; Communication; Entertainment; Creativity; News, Reference, and Information; and Reading. We've also included links to in-depth reviews where available. Rest assured that even those apps that haven't been fully reviewed are included because they've impressed us after some serious hands-on time.

The specifics of Jet’s business model aren’t important, for our purposes. What’s important is that, in the run-up to its launch, Jet ran a contest to try to get more people signed up for its “Insider” program, which entitled them to a free 6-month trial of the site and other perks. To stoke interest in the contest, the company offered 100,000 shares of Jet stock to the person who could sign up the most new Insiders, and 10,000 shares to the nine people with the next-highest numbers of sign-ups. (The company didn’t indicate how much 100,000 shares was, relative to its total number of shares, but one person familiar with Jet’s finances said that the winner’s stock could be worth between $10 million and $20 million if everything goes according to plan.)

Reblogged this on To Be Continued… Christine and commented:
Poor people take a lot of heat for being “responsible” for their plight. Although there will always be folks unwilling to do anything to improve their condition, many poor people are employed and working long hours and still unable to provide the quality of life for their families that they deserve. Why do some politicians and pundits continually depict the poor as somehow “deserving” of their status, and the wealthy as having “earned” or been “rightfully selected” for their good fortune? This TED Talk gives us a glimpse at how “having it all” literally affects the minds, and therefore actions, of the rich. Which in turn, affects the attitudes we hold about the less fortunate among us

London is a city of crossings. The River Thames cuts a snakelike path across the city’s belly, giving rise to bridges of all sorts—more than 200 today. They include the London Bridge, which dates to Roman times, though the most recent version was built in 1973, and the Tower Bridge, which is what most people probably picture when they hear “London Bridge.” The Millennium Bridge is a graceful ribbon of steel that spans the river between St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern. We’ll soon see the Garden Bridge, a controversial park-on-pylons designed by star architect Thomas Heatherwick. Its $270 million price tag has caused some amount of outrage; when it opens in 2018, it will be the most expensive footbridge ever built.

The inventor who may kill the power cord
Meredith Perry is working on a technology that would allow us to walk into any uBeam-equipped room and find that our electronic devices immediately begin charging, writes Marco della Cava in Change Agents.
Check out this story on USATODAY.com: http://usat.ly/1EH7fzC